


Collaboration

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: (sadly temporarily resolved sexual tension), Backstory, Circle of Magi Culture and Customs, Heartbreaking, M/M, Magic and Science, Painfic, Resolved Sexual Tension, Tevinter Being Tevinter, Tevinter Culture and Customs, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension, loss of a loved one, some light blood magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 19:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6870967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dorian falls in love with his dearest friend. He knows exactly what he’s allowed, and it will never be enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collaboration

“Hold this in place for me, will you?” Dorian says. 

He clamps his stylus between his teeth and a chip of fade-touched quartz between his fingernails, not quite long enough for the task. The bead of molten gold is cooling where the quartz will go, centered on the forehead of this young wyvern’s skull. 

Heat from Rilineus’s body eclipses every light, every fire in the room. And the smokeless coals give off a truly dreadful aura if they aren’t doused every few hours. He presses the quartz into the blob of gold, along with a thread of his own magic, fire and spirit wound together into something weirder, stronger. 

“You’re shaking,” Rilineus says, adjusting his grip on the skull.

“Whatever gives you that idea?”

“That would be the tremor in your hands.”

The quartz sticks. Rilineus smiles, brighter than a shaft of sunlight through a cloudbank, and the whole of the reason Dorian does not commit his poetic foibles to paper. 

The morning’s fourth bell rings, and Dorian straightens, cracks his spine. Smirks, an expression his companion returns. His insides contort, and he wishes very much that this childish _infatuation_ would pass, so that he could get on with the business at hand. 

He has one year, seven months, and the binding of a demon before the Circle of Magi at Quarinus declares his mastery of the arcane and sets him loose upon the world. 

If he is very, very lucky he just might emerge from both of them alive.

  


“When you were ten,” Rilineus asks, with a stack of papers six inches high at his hip, “You understood the meaning of the words, ‘If I cannot read your script, you will not pass,’ yes?”

“ _I_ did,” he says. “I was, however, quite advanced for my age.”

They’ve chosen a broad-branched tree and a hot day, Dorian with his own books and Rilineus with his students’ work. Their shoulders touch, backs against the trunk, A bead of sweat creeps down the back of Dorian’s neck, and he squashes the urge lean over and kiss him full on the mouth. He is very glad he does not flush easily.

Rilineus laughs and rolls his eyes, hands over a sheaf of parchment, recently scraped.

Dorian squints one eye and lets his mouth contorts into a shape it should not make before he hands the work back. He says, “This is why I give my students _practical_ exams whenever possible.”

“I never would have thought of _that_ ,” Rilineus mocks. “Do you know what happens to the poor laetan teacher when one of you altii scions sets his own hair on _fire_? Besides, how are they supposed to find their moral centers if I never make them _think_?”

“Ah yes, the moral center. All soft and gooey, especially in the young.”

“I’m serious,” he says. He elbows Dorian in the ribs. “If one person steps out of my door thinking, _there must be a better way to solve my problems than throwing another dead slave at them_ , then I’ve done well.”

  


Long days, late nights, and standing examinations. 

The wyvern makes a proud accent at the head of Dorian’s staff, and he no longer stills his fingers _consciously_ when Rilineus is nearby. He can live with friendship. Lasts longer than a bright spark and quick fade, anyway. 

Professional mages and hobbyists from out of the upper ranks of the altii, from the halls of the Magisterium, haunt the circle tower at Quarinus now. Asking, probing, sharing whispers of innovation with those who might prove useful to them. One follows rumors about the manipulation of time via the Fade across walkways and greens to a cafe that serves gilded cocoa in the autumn chill. He takes a seat at the table at Dorian’s left and makes his introduction, pomp with substance backing it up. 

That there’s _very little_ theory to _be_ backed up makes the Magister Alexius’s interest all the more invigorating. 

  


Some who wish only their Enchanter’s seal turn up with the binding of a spirit--the right finesse will keep it from turning demon--and Rilineus turns up in Dorian’s room with a scowl on his face and blood caked under his fingernails. 

“I’ve just spent the last six hours stitching children back together,” he says, all a healer’s unpretentious rage in the crease between his brows. 

“They have to _learn_ ,” he replies, slips a finger between the pages of his book to mark his place.

“Yes, by slicing down their arms and calling wisps into their service. That will do them well, won’t damage their souls or their psyches at all.”

The short, whip-thin scar just beneath Dorian’s left elbow had bothered his vanity for years, the lancing pain as a dying spirit dissipated into nothingness around him, a failed spellbinding. He got better; the other cuts had been healed over without a mark to show, but they got to choose whether they wanted to keep the first one.

“They cried,” Rilineus says, “Every one of them.”

“We all cry, the first handful of times.”

“Yes. That’s the problem.”

  


Spring brings roiling storms, thick air, forked lightning in staggered streaks across the sky. On a day with hail clattering on the roof and windows of the senior apprentices’ library, Rilineus gives him a book. 

This is an ordinary thing, the exchange of codexes over tumblers of whiskey or a morning meal of bread, olives, and honey. Their fingers touch, and this time, Dorian allows his to linger where they are, allows the flush that creeps up the back of his neck, allows a thousand battered feelings to cloud his throat and head.

Rilineus coughs, and draws back slowly. 

“I think,” he says, in a voice that steadies with each word, “That I’ve found a way to recruit the spirits we need. If you can find a way to make it work.”

He wonders what might come of taking his hand again, of bringing the knuckles of his dearest friend to his lips in a quiet, dry kiss. He does not. 

He cracks the ancient tome instead, scanning sentences in a dialect of Tevene in which he scarcely remembers every other word. _Dream your way to them, and ask nicely once you have_ is the jist, and it’s so--novel, that he laughs, and looks up to find Rilineus chewing on his lower lip. His heart beats madly in his chest, as if it’s trying to escape. 

  


Dorian waits a week for a friend with a fine hand for languages to come back with a translation, and he sets the spells and wards with deadly stillness. He’s never _spoken_ with a spirit, such as they are, only bound them to his will, placed them in the bodies of the dead to aid his cause. It’s all very novel, really.

He cannot sleep. 

Every small sound makes him twitch beneath his bedclothes, the hum of the wards and his own breathing. Dorian opens his eyes to darkness and breathes--even, steady--hears Rilineus voice as if the man were in the room with him. His nerves alight, every inch of skin overwarm. 

He casts off his blankets and speaks the words to dissolve his spells. Curses. Jumps at the knock on the door. 

It creaks open. Rilineus. Only full Enchanters get to have locks. 

The day’s hail has turned to steady, driving rain, and Rilineus speaks beneath the din. 

“I can’t sleep, I--Dorian,” he breathes, steadies. “I see you can’t either, and if you’re up for a bit of fun I thought we might.” He coughs. “Thought we might get each other out of our systems. Such as they are. Ah.”

The world does not deign to give him lightning, then, does not curl with mounting thunder, and Dorian shakes when he says, “Yes, of course. Come here.” 

The kiss is everything he’s ever wanted and nothing he’s ever wanted--but he takes it. And what comes after, delightful, wrought, all mouths and hands and _now_ , the world gives him lightning _now_ , with Rilineus _in_ him and every touch a point of electric static. 

They do not sleep. 

  


They do not see one another the next day, or the one after. Rilineus is gone when Dorian wakes, and Dorian has a set of standing exams--all rhetoric, the verbal art of the necromantic spell. He very nearly fails them, feeling the ghosts of Rilineus’ hands all over his body. Stumbling over conjugations that haven’t been in daily use for a century. 

He cannot sleep with wards, and drops them, and he cannot sleep with the spells meant to attract the spirits, and so he drops them and hopes that such entities as he needs will come to him. That _Rilineus_ will come to _him_ , just once more. A goodbye, a hurrah, 

That, he decides, he could live with. 

When he sees him again it’s with heated skin and short breath, Rilineus at the cafe with a chilled drink in his hand, both beading sweat into the afternoon heat. 

(He can taste the memory of that sweat, and puts the thought from his mind.)

“Dorian,” he calls, waving madly and smiling with an ease Dorian himself has none of. “Come here, do you have any new ideas for the summoning?”

“As a matter of fact,” Dorian replies, “That’s exactly what I have.”


End file.
